Nailed it.

Well if'n that wasn't the week from the lowest plane of Hell.

Moving at work under Jim's approach of, "I'm Sicilian, we don't make plans."

And coupled with the fact that we went along to the Euro Expo run by Flight Centre last week and in order to obtain their discount, we had to lock in and pay for flights by last Friday.

Well the money wasn't a problem, we knew that would happen, but the flight dates had to be sorted out for not only the two of us, but for 4 other people whose itinerary I hadn't finished working out.

Further complicated by the alteration of our initial destination from London/Berlin to Frankfurt/Vienna and I found myself with not a spare second to unwind.

But, hours of online detective work paid off and perhaps the 6th route I plotted has now become final.

I only ripped out 3 clumps of hair too, so that's pretty good going.

I had to give up Venice as getting there from Ljubljana may have required a parachute. The train goes there but first goes full north across the border into Austria before turning around and making about 20 stops for Italian and Slovenian Nannas to get on.
If it went direct it would be a 2 hour trip. It can take up to 8.5 hours.

Yet another fine example of good old fashioned Italian organisation.

Anyway, the point is, it would have allowed us only two nights and one day in Venice for almost two full days of travel to get in and out of the damned place.

I would have found it very frustrating to go to Venice and not have time to see the galleries and such properly.

So we diced Venice and have elected to spend one of the extra nights in London so that the boys can do an overnight trip to Amsterdam, plus the other night will be spent in Zagreb in a bid to make the journey from Berlin/Dresden to Celje somewhat easier.
Really looking forward to the passive smoking.

The final route will be:

Frankfurt/Vienna -5 nights - day trips to Budapest and Prague
Berlin -at Tone's 4 nights
Dresden - 1 night
Zagreb - 1 night
Celje/Vitanje - 3 nights (meet relatives/Dad's home town)
Ljubljana - 4 nights - day trips to Lake Bled, Piran, Predjama
Salzburg - 3 nights - day trip to Hitler's Eagle's Nest
Munich - 5 nights - day trips to Schloss Linderhof & Neuschwanstein/Oberammergau, Rothenburg/Harburg,Ingolstadt
London -5 nights - maybe a day trip to Bath
Hong Kong - incl Disneyland

And the best thing is that because I made a mistake , we will now be spending our 20th unniversary in London instead of on some God awful long haul flight.

We plan to do Beatles walk and cross Abbey Road again on that day. woot woot